Most business owners I speak to fall into one of two camps. Either they've never thought about WordPress maintenance at all, or they thought about it once — briefly — after their site went down at the worst possible moment. Neither is a great place to be.
The truth is, WordPress maintenance used to be optional in the same way that locking your car used to be optional. Then the world changed, and now it very much isn't.
What Actually Happens When You Don't Maintain Your Site
WordPress powers around 43% of all websites on the internet. That makes it an incredibly appealing target. Automated bots are constantly scanning for known vulnerabilities in outdated plugins, themes, and core installations. They're not targeting you specifically — they're targeting everyone at once, all the time.
An unmaintained WordPress site isn't just at risk. It's essentially a door left ajar in a busy street.
When a plugin vulnerability is discovered, security researchers publish details — and so does everyone else. The window between "vulnerability announced" and "active exploitation" can be measured in hours. If your plugins haven't been updated, you're sitting in that window and hoping nobody notices.
Beyond Security: Performance Degrades Over Time
Security is the dramatic headline, but performance decay is the slow bleed that costs businesses money quietly and consistently. Without regular maintenance, a few things happen to your WordPress site:
Your database fills up with junk. Post revisions, spam comments, transient data, orphaned metadata — it accumulates. A database that started clean will degrade noticeably over a year or two of active publishing.
Plugins accumulate and conflict. Most WordPress sites gain plugins over time and rarely lose them. Conflicts between outdated plugins are one of the most common causes of mysterious slowdowns and broken functionality.
Images stay oversized. Unless someone is actively optimising uploads, your media library becomes a collection of enormous files that browsers have to download in full, every time.
The Compounding Problem
Here's what makes unmaintained WordPress sites particularly frustrating to fix: the problems compound. An ignored plugin update from six months ago means you're now multiple major versions behind. Jumping multiple versions in one go is significantly riskier than staying current. What could have been a routine five-minute update becomes a careful, tested migration.
The same is true of security incidents. A site that's been quietly compromised for months is dramatically harder to clean than one where an intrusion is caught within hours. Malware embeds itself. Backdoors multiply. By the time something surfaces visibly — a defacement, a redirect to a spam site, a Google "This site may be hacked" warning — the cleanup bill is substantial.
What Good Maintenance Actually Looks Like
Proper WordPress maintenance isn't a single task. It's an ongoing set of practices that run in the background so you never have to think about them:
Regular updates to core, themes, and plugins — tested before deployment. Daily off-site backups with a tested restore process (a backup you've never tested is not a backup). Uptime monitoring so you know about problems before your customers do. Database optimisation on a regular schedule. Security scanning to catch intrusions early.
None of this is glamorous. It's the digital equivalent of changing the oil in your car. But like an oil change, the cost of doing it regularly is a fraction of the cost of not doing it at all.
The Bottom Line
If your business depends on your website — for enquiries, sales, credibility, anything — then your website deserves to be looked after properly. The question isn't whether WordPress maintenance is worth the cost. It's whether you can afford to find out what happens without it.